Year 501 Read Online Free PDF Page A

peasant rights, and drive the villagers into shantytowns or to the Amazon, where they are then blamed for deforestation as they clear land in a desperate attempt to survive. Brazilian medical researchers describe the population of the region as a new subspecies: “Pygmies,” with 40 percent the brain capacity of humans—the result of severe malnutrition in a region with much fertile land, owned by large plantations that produce cash crops for export. 13
    Brazil is a world center of such triumphs as child slavery, with some 7 million children working as slaves and prostitutes, exploited, overworked, deprived of health and education, “or just deprived of their childhood,” an International Labor Organization study estimates. The luckier children can look forward to work for drug traffickers in exchange for glue to sniff to “make the hunger go away.” The figure worldwide is estimated at hundreds of millions, “one of the grimmer ironies of the age,” George Moffett comments. Had the grim result been found in Eastern Europe it would have been a proof of the bestiality of the Communist enemy; since it is the normal situation in Western domains, it is only irony, the result of “endemic third-world poverty...exacerbated as financially strapped governments have cut expenditures for education,” all with no cause.
    Brazil also wins the prize for torture and murder of street children by the security forces—”a process of extermination of young people” according to the head of the Justice Department in Rio de Janeiro (Hélio Saboya), targeting the 7-8 million street children who “beg, steal, or sniff glue” and “for a few glorious moments forget who or where they are” (London Guardian correspondent Jan Rocha). In Rio, a congressional commission identified 15 death squads, most of them made up of police officers and financed by merchants. Bodies of children murdered by death squads are found outside metropolitan areas with their hands tied, showing signs of torture, riddled with bullet holes. Street girls are forced to work as prostitutes. The Legal Medical Institute recorded 427 children murdered in Rio alone in the first ten months of 1991, most by death squads. A Brazilian parliamentary study released in December 1991 reported that 7000 children had been killed in the past four years. 14
    Truly a tribute to our magnificence and the “modern scientific methods of development based solidly on capitalism” in a territory as much “worth exploitation” as any in the world.
    We should not underestimate the scale of the achievement. It took real talent to create a nightmare in a country as favored and richly-endowed as Brazil. In the light of such triumphs, it is understandable that the ruling class of the new imperial age should be dedicated with such passion to helping others share the wonders, and that the ideological managers should celebrate the accomplishment with such enthusiasm and self-praise.

    6. Fundamentalism Triumphant
    One might object that despite its unusual advantages, Brazil is still not the optimal testing area to demonstrate the virtues of the neoliberal doctrines that “American-style capitalism” urges upon countries it deems “worth exploitation.” Perhaps it would be better to try Venezuela, even more favorable terrain with its extraordinary resources, including the richest petroleum reserves outside the Middle East. We might, then, have a look at that success story.
    In a major scholarly study of US-Venezuelan relations, Stephen Rabe writes that after World War II, the US “actively supported the vicious and venal regime of Juan Vicente Gómez,” who opened the country wide to foreign exploitation. The State Department shelved the “Open Door” policy in the usual way, recognizing the possibility of “U.S. economic hegemony in Venezuela,” hence pressuring its government to bar